From the first moment I first went online in 1996, forums were the main place to hang out. In fact the very first thing I did was join an online forum run by the Greek magazine "PC Master" so I could directly to my favourite game reviewers (for me it was Tsourinakis, for those old [...]

A bit of an effortpost :)

Please do crosspost in more fitting communities if you think of any

  • trailee@sh.itjust.works
    2·
    2 months ago

    I started out with local forums on 2400–9600 baud dial up BBSes with banks of only maybe half a dozen modems for simultaneous use, run by self-funded hobbyists (who has the time and knowledge for that?). Pre-internet, if you will, although really internet did exist then, just primarily with academic and DARPA users and not public ISPs. The pinnacle of software evolution there was MajorMUD (on MajorBBS), with great adventures and full ANSI-colored text and ASCII art, but the local forms were fun too. We even had an occasional IRL picnic since everyone was within a reasonable area (not to have long-distance phone charges). But it meant the niche topics were few and far between, lacking a sufficiently broad user base (hello Lemmy!).

    Boy I really hated the mess of forums you described as one of the golden eras. It wasn’t just the fractured identity management. BBcode was functional, but damned ugly, and difficult to navigate.

    I hope you’re right about the future. Reddit was far and away the best forum discussion ground I had ever used, until it wasn’t anymore. I particularly like the idea mentioned in another comment of a future where (journalism, academic, professional, etc.) organizations might provide identity services in the fediverse and we could interact with either known or anonymous users. Bots and AI training are ugly issues you don’t address at all though.

    I’m curious to hear your thoughts about publishing a post like that on your blog and then publishing a link to it here in the fediverse. Obviously you expect the discussion to occur here rather than in the curiously-still-enabled Wordpress comments. Would it be better to post the original content on Lemmy, but you still feel tied to Wordpress and having an RSS feed? Does Lemmy still feel like an experiment that might end whereas the blog is more still your own content repository?

    • db0@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
      21·
      2 months ago

      I’m curious to hear your thoughts about publishing a post like that on your blog and then publishing a link to it here in the fediverse. Obviously you expect the discussion to occur here rather than in the curiously-still-enabled Wordpress comments. Would it be better to post the original content on Lemmy, but you still feel tied to Wordpress and having an RSS feed? Does Lemmy still feel like an experiment that might end whereas the blog is more still your own content repository?

      This is how it works on Mastodon btw. If you comment on this post, it will appear as comment on wordpress as well. Allowing interaction between people in and out of fediverse.

      For lemmy however, one needs to post to a community, so a wordpress post cannot stand alone. I won’t lie however, I’d love to say to my wordpress “Post this to so-and-so lemmy community automatically” instead of mastodon, and have the lemmy comments sync to my wordpress. But unfortunately the wordpress plugin was developed with Mastodon in mind only as it’s the elephant in the room. Maybe people can ask the plugin devs to allow this, but I’m too busy to follow up on this myself.

      • trailee@sh.itjust.works
        1·
        2 months ago

        Oh that’s interesting. Twitter never interested me, and I’ve never created a mastodon account either. I guess it makes sense that the best way to write a long post when microblogging is in a macroblog and then link sharing. Seems like massive irony there, highlighting the funny nature of microblogging.